Fun with tea-partiers.

In the last couple of weeks, I've been having fun with my Facebook account by violating one of my cardinal rules. That rule is to never post anything likely to be inflammatory or to respond to anything inflammatory with a rebuttal. The wisdom in this rule holds that the only outcome of such an engagement is trash-talk on either side and no perceivable gain in consensus view.

Simply put: you just get pissed off for no reason.

But I have this friend (in a loose sense of the word) from high school who grew up to be a member of the Tea Party, and she has a tendency to either respond to my posts with nonsense or post her own (in my view) ridiculous and unexamined findings. And rather than shy away from confrontation, I've taken the opportunity not once, but twice, to engage with her and put my recent gains as a scholar to the task of totally annihilating her extremely shaky positions.

It's a good exercise in talking a person into a logical corner, and it's had the added benefit of helping me to refine my views - to determine exactly where I stand on various issues and what kind of political and economic thinker I am.

In short, it's been a ball.

We've had two dust ups over Fox News and the mosque at "Ground Zero" (that is to say, the Islamic cultural center being built in an old Burlington Coat Factory building two blocks from where the WTC once stood). In both cases, I've rebutted until she was forced to fall back on the "yeah, but you're a socialist and you just don't understand America" argument. In the common vernacular: until she lost the debate but couldn't admit it.

The amusing, and yet heartbreakingly sad, thing about these exchanges is that they reveal how little my friend knows about anything: about socialism, about democracy, about the history of this country, and about what kind of a game the people she believes in are running on her. Wrapped in the pernicious Dunning-Kruger effect, she is impervious to all fact... as are a number of her friends (who have also taken the opportunity to cross mental swords with me, but who don't fare all that well since they blatantly disdain education as a valuable commodity in American discourse and therefore are not capable of constructing intelligent comments).

On the one hand, these exchanges continue to confirm my deep-seated believe that the majority of people in this country are too ignorant to be of any use to the rest of us in the dark days to come. On the other hand, they reinforce my confidence that I'll be able to get along without them.

And besides, making a fool of someone can be a lot of fun... especially when they have no idea you've made a fool of them and are therefore not upset in the least at the development.

It's like Grand Theft Auto for the mind.

And one more thing: on socialism as epithet.

As an addendum to the last post, I do want to go on the record as being rather tired of something that I've noticed in my various exchanges with the tea-partiers: that "socialism" is still the epithet de rigueur when it comes to dismissing a person's argument without either understanding or confronting it.

( Consider the exchange on the subject of the Ground Zero mosque... )

I'm really growing to love debating. I can't wait to do some more with folks who can actually argue back.

EDIT: I'm honor-bound to point out, in fairness to my friend, that she apparently did not mean to use "socialism" as a dismissal - merely to alert her other friend that I was on a radically different page, so that he might better understand my argument. I clearly misunderstood her.

She seemed to feel that my response was fair and that my point about the perils of defining hate speech was especially crucial. I'm feeling better and better about these exchanges. As I expected, they are growing into something very productive for both of us.